Jane Blackmore, her husband’s only legal wife, left Bountiful after being forced to be den mother to a gaggle of younger wives. During the long wait for justice, her children have grown up without her and she has become a grandmother.Pool
/ Getty Images

Debbie Palmer escaped the polygamous community of Bountiful in the 1980s and went to police. Only now, three decades on, have charges been laid.Ian Smith
/ Vancouver Sun

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It has been a ponderously long journey to this week’s filing of charges against four members of the reclusive, B.C. polygamous community of Bountiful.

It has cost millions of dollars for the repeated investigations, the legal opinions dating back to the 1980s, and a lengthy, constitutional reference case in 2011 that determined the criminal sanction against polygamy is valid despite constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, expression and association.

But the biggest cost is a human one.

Generations have suffered under the yoke of polygamy — a practice that the judge in the reference case determined is inherently harmful to women and children.

And, as these charges drift through the courts, more lives will continue to be shaped by religious leaders who believe that they are beyond the law.

They have good reason for that belief given the legal foot-dragging that dates back almost as far as the community’s founding in 1952.

Two former bishops of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — Winston Blackmore and James Oler — had been charged earlier with one count each of polygamy. The first charges were quickly dropped in 2009 because of an administrative error that left the attorney general no choice but to do a constitutional reference.

Surely this time, everything is in order.

Yet one can’t help wonder why there are so few charges.

Only a few months ago in Utah, Blackmore admitted under oath that 10 of his 24 “wives” were under the age of 18.

It is almost inconceivable that a religious leader, let alone one who runs a school, could admit to that and not be charged with sexual exploitation.

Beyond that, it’s well known to Immigration Canada that many of his young wives are undocumented Americans. In the 1990s, some were allowed to stay on the compassionate grounds because of their children.

But a decade ago, three were deported. They live in Idaho, little more than a 15-minute drive from Bountiful.

Yet, Blackmore — father to 135 — is only charged with polygamy, which seems to suggest that the bar to laying charges in B.C. — a substantial likelihood of conviction — is almost insurmountable.

Still, he will have his day in court. A man who loves the limelight, it will give him the opportunity to attempt a rerun of the constitutional reference case. He only sat out that case because the B.C. government refused to pay his legal costs to be an intervener.

Oler is charged with both polygamy and with unlawfully taking a child out of Canada for sexual purposes in 2004.

Brandon Blackmore and Emily Ruth (Gail) Crossfield are also charged with child sex trafficking in 2004.

It is somewhat surprising that Crossfield is charged because it challenges the common perception that women are victims in polygamous societies, not perpetrators. Of course, Crossfield’s defence could well be that she had no choice but to go along.

Of the four charges, the trafficking ones are the more important. They get to the root problem of polygamous societies, which is that there are too few women to go around, so girls are forced into marriages.

But what makes these charges so deeply disturbing is that the girls named in the indictments weren’t even born when Debbie Palmer first alerted the police and the B.C. attorney general to the abuses in Bountiful.

It was the late 1980s and Palmer was the first woman who’d escaped Bountiful with her children. She had been a child bride, married to Winston Blackmore’s father, Ray.

In 1991, because of information provided by her and several others who had quietly left, the RCMP recommended charges against Palmer’s father, Dalmon Oler, and against Winston Blackmore, then the bishop in Bountiful.

The B.C. attorney general refused to lay charges because of legal opinions on the polygamy law’s constitutionality.

Today, Palmer is a grandmother. Her appeals for justice in B.C. predated the most egregious abuses by FLDS leaders that came in the early 2000s that have been documented and prosecuted in the United States, including the imprisonment for life of FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs for sexual crimes against girls aged 12 and 15.

Jane Blackmore fled more than a decade ago, leaving behind all but one of her children. She was Winston Blackmore’s first and only legal wife, who had been forced to play den mother to his gaggle of 10 under-aged brides. As Bountiful’s first midwife, she also delivered their babies.

Today, Jane Blackmore, too, is a grandmother who had to threaten legal action against her own daughter to gain access to her grandchildren being raised within an FLDS compound in the United States.

Yet while this week’s charges seem almost too little and too late, they’re still a welcome, small step on the long road to justice.

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